Soon after its establishment, every Greek city became a center of craft production (Tsetskhladze 1998b: 42-3; 2003: 144-7). Many started to manufacture pottery imitating East Greek shapes, expanding step by step to produce terracottas, tiles, amphorae, etc. Nearly every Greek city has left traces of metalworking, based on the use of ingots specially produced for them - for example the cities of the northern Black Sea obtained these supplies from wooded-steppe Scythia (Tsetskhladze 1998b: 66-7). As we have seen, the Pontic cities were largely founded by lonians. It is unsurprising that the bulk of their craftsmen came from Asia Minor as well (Treister 1998; 2001: 59-78), although there is evidence that some were from elsewhere in the Greek world, for example from Eleutherna in Crete and Helike in the Peloponnese (Treister and Shelov-Kovedyaev 1989).
Special metal workshops sprang up in the late archaic period, producing objects in styles familiar to the local Scythian and Thracian elites, the Hallstatt chiefs of central Europe, and others. In these shops craftsmen of Milesian, Ephesian, and Lydian origin worked alongside each other (Treister 1998; 2001: 59-78).
Fine pottery and amphorae are the principal evidence used to study trade relations.14 Pottery from southern Ionia was widespread throughout the Pontic region in the seventh century and the early sixth; pottery from northern Ionia later displaced it. Transport amphorae from Chios, Lesbos, and Clazomenae are commonplace. Ionian merchants probably brought the small quantities of goods from Corinth and Naucratis that have been found, and, with Aeginetans, were responsible for the appearance of the first archaic Athenian pottery in the region.
Figure 17.6 Drawing of lead plaque from Phanagoria Source: After Vinogradov (1998: fig. 3).
Trade relations between the Greek Pontic colonies were also quite well developed. The best sources are lead letters (Vinogradov 1998). One such, found in Phanagoria on the Taman Peninsula, dating from the 530s to the 510s, reads: “This slave was exported for sale from Borysthenes, his name is Phaulles. We wish all (debts?) to be paid” (Vinogradov 1998: 160-3) (figure 17.6). It demonstrates the existence of a slave trade between Phanagoria and Borysthenes/Olbia. To date we have five letters on lead or ostraka indicating that a slave trade was also well developed at least along the northern Black Sea littoral (Vinogradov 1998).
Each large city possessed a fine harbor. According to Strabo, Theodosia “is situated in a fertile plain and has a harbor that can accommodate as many as a hundred ships; this harbor in earlier times was a boundary between the countries of the Bosporus and the Taurians” (7.4.4); Nymphaeum possessed a good harbor, while Panticapaeum controlled the entrance to the Sea of Azov and its harbor could hold up to 30 ships (Strabo 7.4.4). Along the north-west shore, deep harbors were few but the mouths of the major rivers were both sources of fish and easy routes into the hinterland. Herodotus writes:
The Borysthenes. . . is. . . the most valuable and productive not only of the rivers in this part of the world, but anywhere else, with the sole exception of the Nile... It provides the finest and most abundant pasture, by far the richest supply of the best sorts of fish, and the most excellent water for drinking - clear and bright... no better crops grow anywhere than along its banks, and where grain is not sown the grass is the most luxuriant in the world.
(Herodotus 4.53; tr. Loeb)
Discussion of trade relations between Pontic Greek cities and local peoples has been based on finds of Greek pottery in local settlements up to 500 km inland from the Black Sea. Examples are discovered at about one local site in ten of those known and excavated, but they are usually few in number (as is the case in both the Thracian and Colchian hinterlands). Trade is an important but complex matter, and its scale and modus operandi are so far unknown. It is no longer possible to hold to a simple explanation - that of a close trading relationship between Greeks and locals. To rely on pottery to prove these links when there are other explanations for the presence of pottery in local settlements is methodologically dubious. And such are the quantities that they give no encouragement to the view that the greater they are, the more intensive and closer the links. The Athenian painted pottery found in many tombs of the local elite could just as easily have been a gift from the Greeks as a traded commodity. We do not know what interpretation the locals placed on the scenes depicted; we do know that these tombs contained jewelry and metal vessels, and that the local elite was much keener on such objects (Tsetskhladze 1998b: 51-66).
Deep in the hinterland were several settlements, usually very large, which served as political and economic centers for the local ethnic groups and may well have been distribution centers for goods. Study has shown that they had Greek inhabitants as well (see below), and great quantities of Greek pottery have been found: the 10,000 pieces at Belsk in Scythia, not far from Poltava on the Ukrainian steppes, are just one example (see below).
It is not surprising that everyone investigating trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean focuses on the particular commodities exchanged, especially grain and metals sent from the Black Sea (Tsetskhladze 1998d). Usually, the information given in written sources describing later periods is unthinkingly transposed to the earlier period, and opinions formulated several decades ago have become the new orthodoxy despite a lack of hard evidence to underpin them (Davies 1998: 228-9). As mentioned, there is no evidence to suggest the export of grain from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, particularly Athens, until the late fifth century or the beginning of the fourth, and even then it is not a regular occurrence.15 While Herodotus (7.147) does say that Xerxes saw ships conveying corn from the Black Sea passing through the Hellespont en route to Aegina and the Peloponnese, one should agree with T. G. Figueira (1981: 43-6) that Aegina, mentioned directly in this passage, was the destination of the grain ships, not Athens as many would like it to be: Aegina frequently required grain in large amounts to feed its population (Hahn 1983: 34).
Indeed, Athens was usually able to feed its own population, and only needed to import grain in an emergency (Whitby 1998a). Like Athens, the Black Sea colonies kept a reserve fund to purchase grain in times of famine.16 The Black Sea colonies acquired metals from the local peoples of the hinterland; they had no such resources of their own. Although local societies were keen on luxurious metal objects (the Scythians and Colchians on gold jewelry and decorations produced by Greek craftsmen but styled to the tastes of local elites), we still lack evidence to show where the metal originated. If one were to impose later realities on earlier uncertainties, one might follow Polybius, writing in the second century:
As regards necessities, it is an undisputed fact that the most plentiful supplies and best qualities of cattle and slaves reached us from the countries lying around the Pontus, while among luxuries, the same countries furnish us with an abundance of honey, wax and preserved fish; from the surplus of our countries they take olive-oil and every kind of wine. As for grain, there is give and take - with them sometimes supplying us when we require it and sometimes importing it from us.
(4.38.4-6; tr. Loeb)
World History
